Quotes About Change

So surely did Lincoln midwife this process of social transformation that we look back at the United States before Abraham Lincoln and after him.

Do leaders shape the times or do the times summon their leaders?

To compound the innovative nature of the new administration, Eleanor Roosevelt held her own first press conference at the same time that day. She made a rule that only female reporters could attend, which meant that all over the country conservative publishers had to hire their first female reporters. Indeed, because of Eleanor Roosevelt's weekly press conferences, an entire generation of female journalists got their start.

Through the last days of May and the early days of June, Eleanor

build one would think to be whirled lightly over an

It was this case," Roosevelt later said, "which first waked me to . . . the fact that the courts were not necessarily the best judges of what should be done to better social and industrial conditions.

Republican Robert La Follette of Wisconsin had defied the machine to become governor by waging "war on the railroads that ruled his state.

At last, the crowd composed itself enough for Roosevelt to speak. "At present," he began, "both the old parties are controlled by professional politicians in the interests of the privileged classes." Together, they would forge a new Progressive Party, based on "the right of the people to rule.

first foray into politics, Lincoln also pledged that if his opinions on any subject turned out to be erroneous, he stood "ready to renounce them." With this

Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, How could you have believed that? because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history.

It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.

A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print? In the same way, we never thought to ask, How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade. (So why write novels? Indeed, why! I suppose we have to go on living as if ...)

We all of us seem to have this belief that things are going to get better. Why should they? Sometimes I think we're moving into a new ice age of tyranny and terror, why not? Who's to stop it—us?

I'm not going to be like my mother. You're maniacs. You're mad. "Yes," said Kate. "I know it. And so you won't be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?

A continuity isn't necessarily right, just because it's a continuity.' 'Yes, Ella, it is. It is. Believe me, it is

You talk as if—a person is a person. A man is what he is. He can't be anything else. You can't change that.' 'Well then, I think that's the real difference between us. Because I believe you can change it.' 'Then I don't follow you. And I don't want to. Bad enough to cope with what one is, instead of complicating things even more.

Yet I think we may very well see countries that take it for granted they are democracies losing sight of democracy, for we are living in a time when the great over-simplifiers are very powerful.

For better or worse, we are prepared to experiment with ourselves, to try and be different kinds of people. But you simply submitted to something.

I'm not going to be like my mother. You're maniacs. You're mad. "Yes," said Kate. "I know it. And so you won't be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?

These might work, fight, even commit crimes to get "their" representatives into power, but after that they did not consider they had any responsibility for their choices. For a feature, perhaps a predominant feature of the inhabitants of this planet, was that their broken minds allowed them to hold, and act on—even forcibly and violently—opinions and sets of mind that a short time later—years, a month, even a few minutes—they might utterly repudiate.

Ich glaube, dass Literatur – ein Roman, eine Erzählung, sogar eine Zeile aus einem Gedicht – die Macht hat, Reiche zu zerstören. (Schritte im Schatten)

It seems to me that ideas must flow through humanity like tides.